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Shortest Book
73
pages
Longest Book
1,120
pages
Average book length in
2023
323
pages
Most Shelved
1,161,247
people
also shelved
Least Shelved
21
people
also shelved
Paul’s
average rating for
2023
3.2
3.2
Highest Rated on Goodreads
4.83
average
Paul’s first review of the year
it was amazing
This is a glorious handsome opulent edition of 26 famous stories festooned with notes by Professor Maria Tatar who is your perfect companion, full of insight and knowledge but not freezing – in fact she is slyly playful at times (Snow White in the glass coffin “becomes something of a tourist attraction”….and later : “fairy tale women seem to be unusually tolerant of the hedgehogs, pigs, snakes and other beasts that steal into their rooms at night
This is a glorious handsome opulent edition of 26 famous stories festooned with notes by Professor Maria Tatar who is your perfect companion, full of insight and knowledge but not freezing – in fact she is slyly playful at times (Snow White in the glass coffin “becomes something of a tourist attraction”….and later : “fairy tale women seem to be unusually tolerant of the hedgehogs, pigs, snakes and other beasts that steal into their rooms at night, perhaps because the animals usually manage to make the transformation in to human form before getting between the sheets”).
Reading this slowly over the last six months was like gathering pebbles from the beaches of my own childhood, some intimately familiar, some goldenhued and strange. Two of them I knew just from Danny Kaye’s songs “The King’s New Clothes” and “The Ugly Duckling”. Some I thought I knew but didn’t (“Puss in Boots”, “Rapunzel”). Most I knew but have no memory of how.
There are surprises. I was expecting atrocities, dismemberments, rapes and cannibalism and I got that in spades, but my oh my, there are a few very alarming stories in here. Perhaps the most extreme-horror tale is “The Juniper Tree”. In this one the step-mother one day gets so irritated at her despised stepson that she beheads him by slamming down the lid of a chest while he is reaching in to get an apple. So then she gets nervous, wondering what her husband will say when he comes home and finds his son beheaded.
She went to her room and took a white kerchief from her dresser drawer. She put the boy’s head back on his neck and tied the scarf around it so you couldn’t tell that anything was wrong. Then she sat him down on a chair in front of the door and put an apple in his hand.
Then she tells her daughter to ask the kid for the apple and if he doesn’t answer, she should slap him on the face. So she does that and of course the head flies off his neck. This ruse enables the mother to blame the daughter! Now what?
“Little Marlene,” said her mother, “what a dreadful thing you have done! But don’t breathe a word to a soul, for there’s nothing we can do. We’ll cook him up in a stew.”
So the father comes home and eats the stew and then the story takes an unexpected turn which is far too crazy to summarize.
I wasn’t expecting an oddity like Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Match Girl”. In this short tale there’s a little match girl from a very poor family. Barefoot, she wanders the streets on New Years Eve. Because she hasn’t sold any matches she can’t go back home. So she freezes to death. The end. She gets taken to heaven. So it seems that the moral of the story is very sucky – the meek will be saved, God is counting every hair on your head, don’t worry about being outcast and despised, it will all be okay in the end. But wait. She has a pocketful of matches but she freezes to death. There is a different point here from the meretricious fake ending this slight story has. The real point is that with her matches she could have burned down a rich person’s house and not frozen to death. The real point is that the poor and oppressed have the power in their own hands to change their situation should they only realise it. And further, that conventional piety exists to divert them from this dangerous truth.
I was also not expecting “Donkeyskin”, which I didn’t know. This is a tale explicitly about incest. The dying Queen makes the King swear that he will never remarry unless he finds a woman more beautiful than she is. Some years pass and he realises that their daughter is more beautiful than her mother. So her proposes marriage! The rest of the tale is all about how she escapes that fate.
Maria Tatar weaves many mythologies and folklores together in her notes as she explores the many profound cultural motifs and the psychosexual bedrock from which they spring
[From a note on Rumpeltiltskin] In ancient religions naming the gods compelled them to respond to worshippers, hence the taboo against invoking their names. Knowing the name of your antagonist represents a form of control…in numerous myths and folktales, there is a prohibition against asking the name of the beloved, and violation of the taboo often leads to flight or transformation into an animal.
In tales of three sons, the youngest and often the stupidest of the three is the one singled out for good fortune.
So skipping from heavyweight ponderings to wry humour and always adding a note precisely when the reader thinks “wait, what the hell did I just read?” Maria Tatar could not have served up this bejewelled confectionary any better, not if she had seven league boots on and was attended by twenty frog princes.
Highly recommended.
...more
Reading this slowly over the last six months was like gathering pebbles from the beaches of my own childhood, some intimately familiar, some goldenhued and strange. Two of them I knew just from Danny Kaye’s songs “The King’s New Clothes” and “The Ugly Duckling”. Some I thought I knew but didn’t (“Puss in Boots”, “Rapunzel”). Most I knew but have no memory of how.
There are surprises. I was expecting atrocities, dismemberments, rapes and cannibalism and I got that in spades, but my oh my, there are a few very alarming stories in here. Perhaps the most extreme-horror tale is “The Juniper Tree”. In this one the step-mother one day gets so irritated at her despised stepson that she beheads him by slamming down the lid of a chest while he is reaching in to get an apple. So then she gets nervous, wondering what her husband will say when he comes home and finds his son beheaded.
She went to her room and took a white kerchief from her dresser drawer. She put the boy’s head back on his neck and tied the scarf around it so you couldn’t tell that anything was wrong. Then she sat him down on a chair in front of the door and put an apple in his hand.
Then she tells her daughter to ask the kid for the apple and if he doesn’t answer, she should slap him on the face. So she does that and of course the head flies off his neck. This ruse enables the mother to blame the daughter! Now what?
“Little Marlene,” said her mother, “what a dreadful thing you have done! But don’t breathe a word to a soul, for there’s nothing we can do. We’ll cook him up in a stew.”
So the father comes home and eats the stew and then the story takes an unexpected turn which is far too crazy to summarize.
I wasn’t expecting an oddity like Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Match Girl”. In this short tale there’s a little match girl from a very poor family. Barefoot, she wanders the streets on New Years Eve. Because she hasn’t sold any matches she can’t go back home. So she freezes to death. The end. She gets taken to heaven. So it seems that the moral of the story is very sucky – the meek will be saved, God is counting every hair on your head, don’t worry about being outcast and despised, it will all be okay in the end. But wait. She has a pocketful of matches but she freezes to death. There is a different point here from the meretricious fake ending this slight story has. The real point is that with her matches she could have burned down a rich person’s house and not frozen to death. The real point is that the poor and oppressed have the power in their own hands to change their situation should they only realise it. And further, that conventional piety exists to divert them from this dangerous truth.
I was also not expecting “Donkeyskin”, which I didn’t know. This is a tale explicitly about incest. The dying Queen makes the King swear that he will never remarry unless he finds a woman more beautiful than she is. Some years pass and he realises that their daughter is more beautiful than her mother. So her proposes marriage! The rest of the tale is all about how she escapes that fate.
Maria Tatar weaves many mythologies and folklores together in her notes as she explores the many profound cultural motifs and the psychosexual bedrock from which they spring
[From a note on Rumpeltiltskin] In ancient religions naming the gods compelled them to respond to worshippers, hence the taboo against invoking their names. Knowing the name of your antagonist represents a form of control…in numerous myths and folktales, there is a prohibition against asking the name of the beloved, and violation of the taboo often leads to flight or transformation into an animal.
In tales of three sons, the youngest and often the stupidest of the three is the one singled out for good fortune.
So skipping from heavyweight ponderings to wry humour and always adding a note precisely when the reader thinks “wait, what the hell did I just read?” Maria Tatar could not have served up this bejewelled confectionary any better, not if she had seven league boots on and was attended by twenty frog princes.
Highly recommended.
...more
PAUL’S
2023
BOOKS
it was amazing
really liked it
it was amazing
it was amazing
it was amazing
really liked it
it was amazing
it was amazing
it was amazing
it was amazing
it was amazing
Paul’s last review of the year
it was amazing
26,000 YEARS
There are a lot of books about racism in America. I read two, the blazingly angry Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi, and The Wrath to Come by Sarah Churchwell, also written with white-hot intensity; and I also read Manning Marable’s exhaustive terrific biography of Malcolm X. This excellent book fits perfectly together with those three, another piece in the difficult jigsaw puzzle of America in the 20th century.
The story of 26,000 YEARS
There are a lot of books about racism in America. I read two, the blazingly angry Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi, and The Wrath to Come by Sarah Churchwell, also written with white-hot intensity; and I also read Manning Marable’s exhaustive terrific biography of Malcolm X. This excellent book fits perfectly together with those three, another piece in the difficult jigsaw puzzle of America in the 20th century.
The story of Elijah Muhammed is the story of the Nation of Islam. He was the supreme leader from 1934 to 1975 .
In these early years, everything the NOI did, everything it believed, was a reaction to the profound racism black people experienced every day – just to mention one statistic, from a peak of 161 lynchings in 1892, there were still 24 in 1933. Elijah Muhammed said that by the age of 20 he had witnessed three lynchings. He said :
I’ve seen enough of the white man's brutality to last me 26,000 years
So it is perhaps not surprising he preached a religion that condemned white people as devils and looked forward to the day when all black people could live lives in their own national homeland without any contact with white people. Sounds extreme, but the emotional logic is right there in front of your face.
Muhammed called for a place in the Western hemisphere for African-Americans to establish an independent state. He admitted that the American government would probably not accede to this demand.
IN THE BEGINNING WAS FARD
The founder of the Nation of Islam was a very mysterious man named Wallace Fard Muhammed. They think he was born around 1877 and that in his life he used over 50 aliases. His first 50 years are obscure, then he arrived in Detroit in 1930 and over four years he created the movement known as the Nation of Islam, inventing its complicated and weird theology, renaming all his reportedly 8000 followers by X-ing out their slave names, and discovering his successor Elijah Muhammed; but then he got into some heavy trouble with the cops who told him to leave town and not come back in 1932. Two years later he vanished and no one since has ever turned up any information on what happened to him.
You have to say it’s very impressive, starting up a new religion in three years with a complete radical ideology, one that still flourishes nearly 100 years later.
Fard Muhammed constructed an elaborate world history explaining how it came to be that once the black man (which he called the “original” man) ruled the earth and then the white man came along and enslaved him. Like, what happened? * The explanation he came up with sounded like science fiction – there was a renegade evil black scientist named Yacub who for murky rebellious reasons created by means of genetic experimentation a completely white race of people. (It’s way more complicated than that of course.) Professor Clegg tries so very hard to maintain a scholarly Wikipedialike neutral tone to his detailed exposition of the Nation’s beliefs, but he can’t refrain sometimes from comments such as this :
The myth of Yacub’s creation of the white race and the murderous, deceitful and evil nature attributed to whites by the NOI has given it the distinction of being the most racially chauvinistic black organisation in the history of the United States… his [Fard’s] doctrines were a tragic variation of the ideas of Hitler, racist eugenicists, and other racial purists of his day…. To some, the Muslim history of the Black Nation made perfect sense and explained a great many things; to others it was sheer lunacy
The author clearly states that this creation myth was a product of “the imagination of Fard Muhammed”. There was also an elaborate Judgement Day scenario in which the white race would be condemned and the black race saved by a giant spaceship called the Mother Plane. Professor Clegg says :
Perhaps second only to the Yacub myth, the Mother Plane story was the most peculiar element of the theology of the Nation. Unless one was predisposed to believe in flying saucers, this tale could hardly be told without raising serious doubts even among the most open minded of listeners….
Another extremely bold element of Fard’s belief system was that Christianity was identified as the religion of the white devil and totally rejected. In Fard’s origin story Jesus was the second prophet sent by Allah after Moses, and he was a black man who built the city of Jerusalem and was killed by bounty hunters and was not crucified. The true teaching of Jesus was Islam but the white people falsified history. (The Pope was the head of that conspiracy.) The third prophet sent was Mohammed and then Allah much later saw that the black enslaved people in America needed a fourth prophet, and so sent Fard Muhammed.
The point of this whole enterprise was to enable black people in America to regain their original culture, names, strength and intelligence, and rejoin the Tribe of Shabazz and prepare for the judgment of the white race which will surely come soon.
ELIJAH
He began life as Elijah Poole, seventh son of a sharecropper in a small town in Georgia in the year of 1897. He moved to Detroit, as thousands did, finally encountering Fard Muhammed’s group at the age of 34. He was converted and, for sure, although uneducated, and not a great orator, and a physically small man too, he must have had a quiet charisma, because in a short while Fard realised that it was Elijah who should lead the Nation when he departed the scene, in 1933/4.
Elijah didn’t change much of what Fard taught except for one massive detail : he identified Fard as Allah himself (p123). That is, not a prophet from Allah, but Allah in person. Right there is why orthodox Muslims would reject the NOI teachings as blasphemous. But it took a long time for Elijah to get any grasp of what actual Islam preached, even though he used the Qu’ran all the time; and likewise it took a long time for orthodox Muslims to notice the Nation of Islam. When they did, neither wanted to fall out with the other, so most of the time they politely ignored a whole herd of elephants that were in every room.
Occasionally there would be hotheads who would get mad at Elijah. One orthodox Muslim quoted by a Chicago newspaper “denounced Muhammed as a fraud and a convicted criminal who taught racial hatred contrary to the true teachings of Islam”. But mostly the heat that Elijah brought down was from the usual cops and FBI and hostile press, and that was because the fiery speechifying and the disciplined strength of the Nation of Islam made them all nervous.
QUIET RADICALISM
They were consistent and firm : the black people of America have to do it for themselves, no one is going to help them. They therefore built slowly and painstakingly a string of businesses and told their followers to buy only from those where possible. They got tremendous respect, even, grudgingly, from white opponents. They were a refuge for a lot of people who had been living dissolute lives.
ELIJAH MAKES A HAJJ
This was a big turning point – in 1959 he toured Middle Eastern countries for the first time and performed the hajj. His travels confronted him with some unpalatable facts, such as
In Saudi Arabia and the Holy City itself, African blacks were being legally held as slaves by Arab Muslims p124
At the same time, the Muslim clerics who met Elijah realised that he was preaching some strange belief system that wasn’t Islamic at all. This was awkward all round.
BACK IN THE USA
By now it was the Civil Rights era. Black people “who had risked life and limb” struggling for civil rights and desegregation looked on with horror as Elijah Muhammed made it clear in speech after speech that integration was wrong, the races should be physically separate, Christianity was a trick and any dealings with the US government in the form of voting or education were useless. All other African American leaders, like Martin Luther King, were “hungry for a place among the white race instead of their own race” and had ”turned many potential freedom-fighting Negroes into contented, docile slaves” p131. Not too many people slagged off Martin Luther King, but Elijah did.
This thinking culminated in a horrible period of rapprochement between the Nation of Islam and two white groups, the American Nazi Party and – believe it or not – the KKK. Well, once again, the logic was plain to see – the white groups wanted total racial segregation and so did the Nation. It led to several NOI meetings being attended by the Nazis (in full regalia) or the Klan. Elijah was trying to figure whether they could work something out. In the end, they didn’t.
MALCOLM X
This is where the story gets positively Shakespearean – the doting loving father sees his favourite son betray him, but the favourite son believes in his heart he is rescuing his beloved father from tragic error.
Malcolm came to the view that Elijah’s resolute rejection of any political involvement was a big mistake, and essentially, the NOI was not fighting for black people as it should but was waiting for some kind of divine intervention, which was not going to happen. Elijah stuck to his principles – no dealing with the (white) devil.
Aside from that there was a lot of paranoia about who was going to succeed Elijah. It was complicated.
Well, in 1965 as we know, Malcolm was assassinated, and although three NOI members were later convicted of the crime, Professor Clegg is less than clear, unusually, about whether any order was given by Elijah Muhammed. On the one hand, nothing major happened in the NOI without Elijah’s approval; on the other hand, it was completely out of character, he was not a leader who threatened people with violence. His hair-raising rhetoric was in complete contrast to his gentle demeanour. He was unusual.
THIS REVIEW IS WAY TOO LONG
It is a most fascinating story, that’s my excuse, and this book is a brilliant piece of original detailed research. Highly recommended.
*I was reminded of a more succinct story from Jomo Kenyatta. He said : “When the white man came here we had the land and he had the Bible. Then he taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, he had the land and we had the Bible.” ...more
There are a lot of books about racism in America. I read two, the blazingly angry Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi, and The Wrath to Come by Sarah Churchwell, also written with white-hot intensity; and I also read Manning Marable’s exhaustive terrific biography of Malcolm X. This excellent book fits perfectly together with those three, another piece in the difficult jigsaw puzzle of America in the 20th century.
The story of 26,000 YEARS
There are a lot of books about racism in America. I read two, the blazingly angry Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi, and The Wrath to Come by Sarah Churchwell, also written with white-hot intensity; and I also read Manning Marable’s exhaustive terrific biography of Malcolm X. This excellent book fits perfectly together with those three, another piece in the difficult jigsaw puzzle of America in the 20th century.
The story of Elijah Muhammed is the story of the Nation of Islam. He was the supreme leader from 1934 to 1975 .
In these early years, everything the NOI did, everything it believed, was a reaction to the profound racism black people experienced every day – just to mention one statistic, from a peak of 161 lynchings in 1892, there were still 24 in 1933. Elijah Muhammed said that by the age of 20 he had witnessed three lynchings. He said :
I’ve seen enough of the white man's brutality to last me 26,000 years
So it is perhaps not surprising he preached a religion that condemned white people as devils and looked forward to the day when all black people could live lives in their own national homeland without any contact with white people. Sounds extreme, but the emotional logic is right there in front of your face.
Muhammed called for a place in the Western hemisphere for African-Americans to establish an independent state. He admitted that the American government would probably not accede to this demand.
IN THE BEGINNING WAS FARD
The founder of the Nation of Islam was a very mysterious man named Wallace Fard Muhammed. They think he was born around 1877 and that in his life he used over 50 aliases. His first 50 years are obscure, then he arrived in Detroit in 1930 and over four years he created the movement known as the Nation of Islam, inventing its complicated and weird theology, renaming all his reportedly 8000 followers by X-ing out their slave names, and discovering his successor Elijah Muhammed; but then he got into some heavy trouble with the cops who told him to leave town and not come back in 1932. Two years later he vanished and no one since has ever turned up any information on what happened to him.
You have to say it’s very impressive, starting up a new religion in three years with a complete radical ideology, one that still flourishes nearly 100 years later.
Fard Muhammed constructed an elaborate world history explaining how it came to be that once the black man (which he called the “original” man) ruled the earth and then the white man came along and enslaved him. Like, what happened? * The explanation he came up with sounded like science fiction – there was a renegade evil black scientist named Yacub who for murky rebellious reasons created by means of genetic experimentation a completely white race of people. (It’s way more complicated than that of course.) Professor Clegg tries so very hard to maintain a scholarly Wikipedialike neutral tone to his detailed exposition of the Nation’s beliefs, but he can’t refrain sometimes from comments such as this :
The myth of Yacub’s creation of the white race and the murderous, deceitful and evil nature attributed to whites by the NOI has given it the distinction of being the most racially chauvinistic black organisation in the history of the United States… his [Fard’s] doctrines were a tragic variation of the ideas of Hitler, racist eugenicists, and other racial purists of his day…. To some, the Muslim history of the Black Nation made perfect sense and explained a great many things; to others it was sheer lunacy
The author clearly states that this creation myth was a product of “the imagination of Fard Muhammed”. There was also an elaborate Judgement Day scenario in which the white race would be condemned and the black race saved by a giant spaceship called the Mother Plane. Professor Clegg says :
Perhaps second only to the Yacub myth, the Mother Plane story was the most peculiar element of the theology of the Nation. Unless one was predisposed to believe in flying saucers, this tale could hardly be told without raising serious doubts even among the most open minded of listeners….
Another extremely bold element of Fard’s belief system was that Christianity was identified as the religion of the white devil and totally rejected. In Fard’s origin story Jesus was the second prophet sent by Allah after Moses, and he was a black man who built the city of Jerusalem and was killed by bounty hunters and was not crucified. The true teaching of Jesus was Islam but the white people falsified history. (The Pope was the head of that conspiracy.) The third prophet sent was Mohammed and then Allah much later saw that the black enslaved people in America needed a fourth prophet, and so sent Fard Muhammed.
The point of this whole enterprise was to enable black people in America to regain their original culture, names, strength and intelligence, and rejoin the Tribe of Shabazz and prepare for the judgment of the white race which will surely come soon.
ELIJAH
He began life as Elijah Poole, seventh son of a sharecropper in a small town in Georgia in the year of 1897. He moved to Detroit, as thousands did, finally encountering Fard Muhammed’s group at the age of 34. He was converted and, for sure, although uneducated, and not a great orator, and a physically small man too, he must have had a quiet charisma, because in a short while Fard realised that it was Elijah who should lead the Nation when he departed the scene, in 1933/4.
Elijah didn’t change much of what Fard taught except for one massive detail : he identified Fard as Allah himself (p123). That is, not a prophet from Allah, but Allah in person. Right there is why orthodox Muslims would reject the NOI teachings as blasphemous. But it took a long time for Elijah to get any grasp of what actual Islam preached, even though he used the Qu’ran all the time; and likewise it took a long time for orthodox Muslims to notice the Nation of Islam. When they did, neither wanted to fall out with the other, so most of the time they politely ignored a whole herd of elephants that were in every room.
Occasionally there would be hotheads who would get mad at Elijah. One orthodox Muslim quoted by a Chicago newspaper “denounced Muhammed as a fraud and a convicted criminal who taught racial hatred contrary to the true teachings of Islam”. But mostly the heat that Elijah brought down was from the usual cops and FBI and hostile press, and that was because the fiery speechifying and the disciplined strength of the Nation of Islam made them all nervous.
QUIET RADICALISM
They were consistent and firm : the black people of America have to do it for themselves, no one is going to help them. They therefore built slowly and painstakingly a string of businesses and told their followers to buy only from those where possible. They got tremendous respect, even, grudgingly, from white opponents. They were a refuge for a lot of people who had been living dissolute lives.
ELIJAH MAKES A HAJJ
This was a big turning point – in 1959 he toured Middle Eastern countries for the first time and performed the hajj. His travels confronted him with some unpalatable facts, such as
In Saudi Arabia and the Holy City itself, African blacks were being legally held as slaves by Arab Muslims p124
At the same time, the Muslim clerics who met Elijah realised that he was preaching some strange belief system that wasn’t Islamic at all. This was awkward all round.
BACK IN THE USA
By now it was the Civil Rights era. Black people “who had risked life and limb” struggling for civil rights and desegregation looked on with horror as Elijah Muhammed made it clear in speech after speech that integration was wrong, the races should be physically separate, Christianity was a trick and any dealings with the US government in the form of voting or education were useless. All other African American leaders, like Martin Luther King, were “hungry for a place among the white race instead of their own race” and had ”turned many potential freedom-fighting Negroes into contented, docile slaves” p131. Not too many people slagged off Martin Luther King, but Elijah did.
This thinking culminated in a horrible period of rapprochement between the Nation of Islam and two white groups, the American Nazi Party and – believe it or not – the KKK. Well, once again, the logic was plain to see – the white groups wanted total racial segregation and so did the Nation. It led to several NOI meetings being attended by the Nazis (in full regalia) or the Klan. Elijah was trying to figure whether they could work something out. In the end, they didn’t.
MALCOLM X
This is where the story gets positively Shakespearean – the doting loving father sees his favourite son betray him, but the favourite son believes in his heart he is rescuing his beloved father from tragic error.
Malcolm came to the view that Elijah’s resolute rejection of any political involvement was a big mistake, and essentially, the NOI was not fighting for black people as it should but was waiting for some kind of divine intervention, which was not going to happen. Elijah stuck to his principles – no dealing with the (white) devil.
Aside from that there was a lot of paranoia about who was going to succeed Elijah. It was complicated.
Well, in 1965 as we know, Malcolm was assassinated, and although three NOI members were later convicted of the crime, Professor Clegg is less than clear, unusually, about whether any order was given by Elijah Muhammed. On the one hand, nothing major happened in the NOI without Elijah’s approval; on the other hand, it was completely out of character, he was not a leader who threatened people with violence. His hair-raising rhetoric was in complete contrast to his gentle demeanour. He was unusual.
THIS REVIEW IS WAY TOO LONG
It is a most fascinating story, that’s my excuse, and this book is a brilliant piece of original detailed research. Highly recommended.
*I was reminded of a more succinct story from Jomo Kenyatta. He said : “When the white man came here we had the land and he had the Bible. Then he taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, he had the land and we had the Bible.” ...more
What did you read this year?
